Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine

Scanlan (industrial relations, human resources, and transnational studies, Univ. of Toronto; Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain) builds a case for viewing the Great Famine of 1845 to 1851, also known as the Irish Potato Famine, through a new lens to show that Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom and the British Empire made it uniquely vulnerable to starvation. His book describes how the Great Famine directly caused one million famine-related deaths and drove 1.5 million people to emigrate from Ireland. Scanlan shows that the crisis was fueled by underlying threads of poverty, racism, and colonialism. The Irish were a nation of subsistence farmers whose diet consisted nearly entirely of potatoes. Their neighbor, Great Britain, viewed them as racially different. When the two joined in 1801 on supposedly equal footing as the United Kingdom, Ireland was instead governed by colonial rule, and local agencies were given inadequate resources. Scanlan persuasively argues that the blight that killed Ireland’s potato crops was a biological agent, while the systemic mismanagement of aid was political.